


I don't care, I love you anyhow (part of you lives here)

by clytemnestras



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Established Relationship, F/M, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 12:10:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10966953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: As it has been said:Love and a cough cannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.





	I don't care, I love you anyhow (part of you lives here)

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this recovering from the flu. go figure.
> 
> title and summary by Anne Sexton

And there they are, standing on a rooftop in the rain and it's perfect, really, Nora Effron movie perfect and she can see in his body language how much he just wants to touch her in some way. Hold her hand, or touch her hair or pull her just all the way in to kiss her and Amy...   
  
She steps back and breathes in for four seconds, out for three. She breathes and shakes the rain out of her hair. In for four and out for three. It's so stupid that in that tiny sliver of extra space between them she  _ misses _ him. How can you miss something that is right there, two feet and five, possibly six inches away?   
  
In for four and - and _get it together, Santiago_.   
  
"Amy?" He says it like he's worried. Or, his eyes are worried and he says it like he always says her name, like it's the most wonderful thing he can imagine and that maybe hurts a little more than he can stand it to. He steps forward and all the icicles the rain has sunken into her blood threaten to shatter.   
  
It's all so wrong. Perfect and wonderful and wrong and they  _ lost _ this one.    
  
Amy Santiago doesn't lose cases. (She chooses not to list internally all the terrible ways they've rubbed off on each other.)   
  
His eyes go wide, his whole body looks bigger in a blink and it is with absolute desperation that she wants to curl into him.   
  
"Oh my god," he says, staggering towards her. She is a short sharp shadow on the gravel and he covers her more easily than makes sense. Amy wonders if she's said anything aloud because he folds down around her, but when his coat hits her shoulders she notices that she's shivering so hard it's making her teeth chatter. He mutters so many  _ 'I love you's _ into her wet hair as he eases her inside, her head tipped against his warm, hardly damp chest.   
  
_ My God _ , she thinks,  _ what if I cry? _   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
He gets her into dry clothes and into their bed and wraps her in so many sheets and blankets her circulation threatens to stop altogether.    
  
Once she really comes to she finds herself in his sleepshirt (because he knows she's secretly more comfortable in that than any of her own things) and he's eating ramen on the end of the bed, staring between her and the episode of C.O.P.S. on TV.   
  
"Hey," she says, because she hasn't spoken in four hours and that's possibly a record.   
  
He drops the ramen and scrambles up the bed. "Hey, what the hell happened back there? That was kind of completely terrifying."   
  
She smiles but her eyebrows knit together. "I know you're worried and I love you so much but I don't think I can focus whilst there are noodles staining the floor."   
  
He laughs. He laughs and for a second it's like everything is better, not perfect, but better.   
  
He wipes up the noodles with an attitude she would describe as half hearted at best. He grins at her the whole time. She drifts on the feeling it makes sit warm and heavily in her stomach.

  
  
*   


  
She doesn't actually sleep that day.   
  
Okay.   
  
Make that the next three days.    


She pretends to when he bundles her up and once he's out she orders and reorders the filing system on her phone. She always has breakfast ready by the time he groans awake.

She smiles so hard at him over a plate of eggs and toast it makes her face ache. The tension and the smell of antibac spray on the still hot stove swirls around inside her skull. She plants her feet, and just like that the world isn't turning anymore.

He sees the look in her eyes and pretends he doesn't know she's running headlong into crazy town, but insists on driving, just in case.

She goes to her desk straight away, spreading out a couple of binders ready for cross-referencing. She looks busy that way. She doesn't have to look at the the chief without feeling her whole body flush to freezing.

Jake hands her a paper coffee cup and when she thanks him he puts his finger to her lips.

"Not me," he says. "Thank Rosa. Apparently terrifying, sleep-deprived Amy is her favourite Amy."   
  
"She is," Rosa agrees. She nods once and almost smiles. Amy salutes back.    
  
He laughs at her, and well, whatever.   
  
She hasn't slept and her body feels like a crime scene in itself. She can be normal or she can be productive, and that's not even a question.   
  
The day is: everything melting around the singular point of her desk and the intel they got before they messed up and his hands when they briefly flutter against her shoulders. The caffeine makes her heart quiver.    
  
There must be something in the papertrail. Something she missed.

The first time she sneezes she scrolls all the way to the bottom of the page. She growls loud enough to make her throat wince and Gina offers to Boston up her coffee.

“No thanks,” she says, and somehow doesn't cry.

She pours over everything, and nothing new is showing up. She doesn't know how the carjacker got away. She doesn't know how he wasn't in the apartment when they got there. She just doesn't… know.

Jake puts his cold hands on the back of her neck and she almost jumps out of the chair.

“Everyone's gone home,” he says. She looks up and the office is close to empty, just the empty husks of officers crawling in for the night shift slinking around the edges.

“Alright,” she says, and when she blinks it's almost like the computer screen is still burning bright behind her eyes. “Let's go home.”

 

*

 

By day four without real sleep she has a system. She can take five minute naps at regular intervals and it almost feels like rest is more than a daydream.

Every time she inhales her throat feels raw.

It can't have been the wrong guy. She has spreadsheets to prove it. She's cross-referenced so many testimonies and other evidence her eyes are rolling in her head.

She blinks once and when she opens her eyes an hour and thirty seven minutes has passed. Jake is wrapping her coat around her shoulders and she lets him.

She sneezes into his shoulder when he steers her into a cab. She is officially two days into the flu of the decade and the two of them couldn't stumble home if they tried.

(They did try the day before, collapsing together on every tenth block and again on every tenth stair.)

Somehow they fall into the apartment without incident, but he dumps her on the couch with little ceremony. “Has the sidewalk always been that far away?”

She means to say something, she really does, but her throat constricts and she coughs until she's dizzy and eventually finds sleep with the back of his hand pressing against her forehead.

 

*

 

When she wakes up Jake is asleep on the end of the couch, head tilted back towards the ceiling; her feet are resting across his lap. On the table there's a mini kettle, three peppermint teabags and a bag of sweet potato chips. When she gasps, even though it's quiet, he jolts awake and wraps his left hand around her right ankle.

“I couldn't find any trail mix.” He looks away then looks back up. “I'm lying. I couldn't bring myself to look the cashier in the eye with a bag of trail mix in my hands, I'm sorry.”

“Oh my god, I love you,” she says, but only the first half of every syllable spills out.

“Wow you are really sick.” He flicks on the kettle.

“No I'm not,” she says, except this time no sound comes out at all. She fumbles for her phone in her pocket and types out  _ shut up  _ to match her expression and her half crossed arms.

He laughs and kisses her forehead when the kettle clicks off. Part of her is mystified by the way the steam rolls from the kettle to the mug and then skywards until it's just air again. She is muzzy-headed and dizzy and feels like at any moment she could sink into the air, just like that, and rest.

“By the way, you're in luck.” He passes her the cup and the weight and warmth and the solidity of his words in the quiet apartment tell her she is still part of the world. “I took the next three days off work for both of us and we're going to watch every Police Academy movie back to back.”

She makes a sound from somewhere in her chest and that, of all things, manages to carry.

“You can pick the movie when you can use your words.” He strokes his thumb on her ankle and Amy feels so heavy on his legs and on the couch, weighed down like the world.

She types  _ I am using my words. _

“Did you hear something?” Jake opens the chips and frowns at the smell.

_ Ha ha,  _ she types _. Very funny.  _ She digs her toes into his thigh. He grips her ankle tighter.

The TV is on, she notices, but can't make out the sounds. Or the pictures, if she's honest.

_ I think we need to talk,  _ she types.

He looks very concerned. She inhales the steam from the tea and can taste it on the back of her tongue.

“We’ll talk,” he says, fiddling with the remote. “After you've slept for at least thirty six hours.”

_ Three,  _ she types.  _ Five at the most. _

 

*

 

He gets her through eight hours sleep by massaging her feet every time the crease reappears between her eyebrows and by the time Amy is nursing her second mug of hot ginger and lemon her voice comes back.

“So,” she says, “I've been completely insane for a few days.”

They are curled together in bed, not touching but close enough together they might as well be. He's inhaling her germs with every breath and she doesn't have the energy to feel worried.

“It was cute until I got scared you might do something crazy like die.”

All the muscles in her body feel like hell. “I wasn't going to die.”

_ Probably _ goes unspoken.

He rolls his eyes, and it's disturbing how much of herself he’s started to reflect. “So what’s going on? And if it's that you're wondering whether Rosa wants to hook up with us, you don't even have to worry because according to Gina she's totally on board.”

She half laughs and half sighs and it rattles through her ribcage. “We screwed up on our case. The perp got away.”

“So? That happens sometimes. We’ll get the next guy.” The look in his eyes almost makes her flinch.

“No, that's not - it was us. The two of us. This isn't the first time we've gotten distracted and messed up working together.” She coughs softly, feeling pathetic, aching to shrink herself down to nothing but atoms.

“But I bought a new mattress and everything was fine.” He takes her hand, and she never really gets used to how warm he is.

“Until now.”

He squeezes her hand too tight. “It was one case. What are you so scared of?”

The question blindsides her. For a couple of drawn out seconds her body forgets how to breathe. “Us? My job? Not... being perfect?”

He sighs and it makes her chest hurt. “You already are perfect. You're you. Things are going to go wrong sometimes and that's okay, because this city is literally crawling with crime, so there's always another scumbag to catch.”

She will never understand how he draws her feelings so close to the surface. “You mean it?”

“Absolutely, New York is actually hell on earth.”

She laughs, and she's afraid for a dark moment it might kill her.

“You always say the right thing, you know that?” She curls up a little tighter, and it is only half because of the aching in her legs.

He squeezes her hand again.

She squeezes back.

 

*

 

She wakes up to Sleepless in Seattle on the laptop and a bowl full of noodle soup. Jake rests his head on her shoulder and taps the box of tissues between them on the bed.

“It's not for crying,” he says, sounding nasal. “I think I caught your flu.”

He sneezes before the opening credits are up and she takes his temperature with the back of her hand against his forehead.

Maybe it's because of the fever, but he feels perfectly fine to her.

"You were kidding about Rosa, right?" She asks, blowing on the soup.

"I was if you wanted me to be kidding."

The soup burns her tongue anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> come chat with me on tumblr [@bohemicns](https://) if you feel so inclined


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